CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

Transcription

1 OPTIMISING YOUR CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY April 2013 Onalytica. onalytica.com Understand the voice of the market and its influencers

2 OPTIMISING YOUR CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY C ompanies have been producing white papers, research, webinars, case studies and videos for many years. But until recently there was no one catchall phrase to collectively describe these marketing efforts. Now, however, these activities are increasingly referred to as content marketing. Broadly speaking, content marketing is an umbrella term for a wide range of interactions with specific audiences. Content marketing can range from a piece of video designed to entertain a potential customer to a piece of thought leadership research that informs an influential blogger. And it is already big business. Last year the UK Content Marketing Association estimated that the UK s content marketing industry alone was worth about 1 billion. Content marketing is a promotional technique that puts relevance and non-interruption at its core. And in the space of a couple of years, content marketing has become the marketing technique du jour. Nearly two thirds of UK marketers expect to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months, according to a survey carried out by the Content Market Institute and the Direct Marketing Association. 2

3 WHY NOW? In some ways it s surprising it has taken so long for content marketing to really take off. In 1996, Microsoft founder Bill Gates famously predicted that content would create opportunities for businesses large and small in his prophetic essay Content Is King in Search engines made Gates vision a reality, especially now that search results are critical to the success or failure of many businesses. While other SEO tactics such as link building have become less effective, content has remained the only surefire way to stay relevant online. Social media has increased demand for quality content by offering a platform that allows content to go viral while creating another way for search engines to gauge the popularity and relevance of company websites. Content has become an essential currency for marketers. And not only must they produce their own content marketing but they must seek to influence the content that is written about them by others. The sheer number and diversity of people publishing online has provided another place for consumers to research their buying decisions and provided many more influential people for marketers to consider....content has remained the only surefire way to stay relevant online For example, consumers increasingly seek out the views of experts before they make a buying decision, a fact that has made influencer programmes a critical marketing technique. These changes have already led to more personalised one-to-one communications between companies and the people they seek to influence. And content plays a critical role in the dialogue between companies and their influencers because it gives companies a reason to promote themselves in a credible way. 3

4 CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY Having a content marketing strategy is essential. But for many companies creating an effective strategy presents a huge challenge. Exactly who should you be speaking to and when? What should you be saying? Which types of content marketing tactics are most effective? Moreover, how can you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing in financial terms? Anton Buchner, a customer engagement and digital marketing strategist at Front Foot Marketing, thinks that all too often marketers lack a strategic approach to content marketing. With many content marketing strategies it seems like marketers are taking a quantity over quality approach. You must agree the strategic framework for valuable content versus a scattergun approach of whatever content is available at that time, he advises....all too often marketers lack a strategic approach to content marketing But without an understanding of the drivers of value, it is difficult to formulate an effective strategy. Justifying content marketing spend in the B2C space is easier for e-commerce businesses because it is easier to measure the success of initiatives. Anyone with access to Google Analytics can set up goals and measure conversions on their websites to see which piece of content led the consumer to an online conversion or sale. This can help to demonstrate the relationship between content and the bottom line. 4

5 CONTENT MARKETING FOR B2B MARKETERS B2B marketers have a tougher time demonstrating their value. It is far harder to demonstrate the value of communicating with influencers than it is with customers. And it has been very challenging to understand the financial implications of these interactions. Many marketers might gauge the success of a white paper by looking at the number of leads that were gathered, how many times the paper was downloaded or the number of visits to a website. But this could mean that a student who downloads a white paper may be judged an equivalent in terms of success to an expert blogger who wields influence. You may also look at the kinds of professionals who downloaded the paper but neither of these numbers necessarily offer a good proxy for effectiveness. These figures don t tell you whether or to what extent you managed to influence the individual or whether the individual then passed their view onto anyone else. And these metrics are unlikely to strongly correlate with market share. It s hard to make a business case for something when you can t identify the drivers of value. And that is the situation in which many content marketers currently find themselves. 5

6 INTRODUCING ONALYTICA IRM In view of these challenges, Onalytica has developed the ultimate tool for developing a content marketing strategy and managing a content marketing programme. Onalytica IRM blends the systematic approach of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with real-time big data analysis, helping to organise relationships with influencers while measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing on an ongoing basis. It does this in several ways. Firstly it tells you when one of your influencers might be interested in something you have to say. Secondly it records interactions over time with influential individuals and thirdly it monitors the effects and outcomes of those interactions. In sum, it records the inputs and outcomes to unearth the most likely drivers of effectiveness, helping you both to prove your return on investment and refine your performance over time. 6

7 A BETTER WAY TO MEASURE Companies that use Onalytica IRM will have more effective and targeted interactions because our system looks for real-time signals about an individual's areas of interest and influence. Moreover, Onalytica IRM lets you measure the effectiveness of content marketing initiatives by enabling you to measure the effect that your content marketing has on the mind share of influencers. Mind share is one of the main objectives of advertising. Studies have shown that increased mind share leads to increased market share because the more you think of a brand, the more likely you are to pick a brand. Our system calculates mind share by taking the number of pieces published that mention your company s name or product and dividing that figure by the total number published by the individual. 7

8 But that s not all. Onalytica also measures Share of Influence (SoI), which is an adapted version of mind share. It shows mind share but accounts for how influential each individual is. It also looks at relative mind share, so you can track whether your mind share is improving in relation to your competitors. SoI acts as a lead indicator for market share. Indeed, international investment bank Jefferies took Share-of-influence (SoI) into account when it issued a recent buy recommendation on online fashion retailer ASOS. According to the bank s equity researcher David Reynolds, the buy recommendation was in part based on the fact that ASOS increased its Share-of-Influence (SoI) of the online debate, when compared to peers such as Zara and H&M. 8

9 MORE THAN A CONTENT MARKETING CALENDAR Lots of marketers talk about content marketing calendars but it s actually far more effective to communicate relevant content exactly when your audience wants to hear it. This helps you be more useful while staying in touch with influencers. All too often content created for marketing purposes has a limited window in which to be effective. Once the content has been published, it often won t be consumed to any great extent again, unless you hold an event or find another way of prolonging its shelf life. Many companies have reams of content marketing white papers sitting in online archives. And the only way that an influencer is going to unearth that content is if they happen to key the right search term into Google or if they already have an inkling of where to find it. Onalytica IRM helps you get the most out of your existing content. It identifies what we call Moments of Influence, which are the exact moments when an influencer might find a specific piece of your content useful. Onalytica IRM analyses the online presence of key influencers looking for real time signals that they might be interested in a piece of content that you have already produced. 9

10 AUTOMATIC COLLATERAL MATCHING Our system knows when a company has something that may be of interest to an influencer because it has a content matching facility that is more sophisticated than just monitoring social media for certain keyword mentions. We call this collateral matching. You upload all your content into the system, from white papers and case studies to company presentations. The system will then flag up as soon as a key influencer produces a piece of content that the system recognises as a match. The marketer is then notified and they can then make a call on whether to act on it by sending the content through to the influencer. Some organisations produce hundreds of case studies. There is no way one person would have time to read all of them or have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every report that has been published since the 1990s or indeed further back. Now they don t have to because the content matching is automated. This feature empowers more junior members of staff. Less experienced team members don t necessarily have to know about the existence of certain content. The system will identify the content for them. 10

11 HOW DOES THE SYSTEM KNOW WHAT IS INTERESTING? Onalytica IRM is flexible. We know marketing and communications professionals are busy people so we have designed the actions to be as simple and user friendly as possible. The system lets you set the threshold of what constitutes a match. You decide how significant the signal needs to be by using a sensitivity gauge that ranges from 1 to 100, with 100 being a direct word for word match with your content. You decide for each piece of content whether the influencer concerned has to just mention a few relevant words relating to the content or whether it should be core to what they are publishing. Onalytica IRM also gives you the ability to decide whether the threshold should change depending on the type of content that an influencer is posting, whether it is a blog post or just a passing tweet. You can also factor in the type of content that you have available. If your content appears in a lengthy report, for example, you might require a higher usefulness threshold than a targeted white paper because the longer report is more likely to have a lot of other information that might not be relevant. Importantly, Onalytica IRM allows you to exercise discretion. The system has flexibility built into it. It can be refined as time goes on and as feedback is gathered. If the person you are contacting appears to be thankful or explicitly thankful then you can assume that they found it useful. If they don t respond or publish anything as a result then it may be appropriate to move the usefulness threshold up. This can be done easily. 11

12 HOW DOES THE SYSTEM KNOW WHO IS INFLUENTIAL? Onalytica has worked with numerous clients to unearth the patterns of influence for different sectors. Onalytica IRM uses its existing Voice-of-the-Market (VoM) solution to identify influencers in your specific sphere. The people that content marketers seek to influence online are themselves prolific publishers, producing reams of indications of what they are interested in or writing about at any time. Our big data analytics make it possible to gauge an individual s influence as well as what or who they are influenced by. 12

13 TALKING TACTICS Content marketers make use of many different tactics but little is known about their effectiveness. Research by the Content Marketing Institute shows that content marketers in the UK, US and Australia use on average at least 12 different tactics, ranging from articles on company websites to case studies. Onalytica IRM can help drive improvements as it provides a centralised way of logging different content marketing tactics while monitoring the effectiveness of those activities in real time. Every activity and interaction can be recorded online via the Onalytica IRM smartphone app. Every time a member of your team sends out a link to a webinar, writes a blog, s a link to a white paper or sends an invite to an event, it is recorded. Not only does this enable managers to identify whether certain activities correlate with influence, it also allows them to see what their employees get up to. It also shows what kind of interactions work best with which types of influencer. The system will quickly show whether your tactics are effective. Onalytica IRM provides a centralised way of logging different marketing tactics and monitoring their effectiveness in real time Onalytica IRM also helps manage your workflow on an on-going basis. It will flag up if you haven t been in touch and will encourage you to schedule a catch up - it helps you to stay relevant. 13

14 WHAT ARE THE OTHER BENEFITS OF ONALYTICA IRM? Onalytica IRM is scalable. Once it is set up and running it has the potential to lower the skillset required to carry out some actions, for example. Less experienced team members can use the system to perform better work and look after more influencers. The smart nature of Onalytica IRM means they will be acting with a high level of certainty. There are other opportunities. You might have a sense that there is demand for a particular piece of thought leadership from certain influencers. But Onalytica IRM allows you to act on more than just a hunch. You can draft a piece of content, upload it into the system and see to what extent your influencers are writing about those issues already. This could help form the business case for an expensive piece of thought leadership research, for example. You can assign the Moment of Influence to anyone. It could even be a senior manager outside of the marketing function. In those cases you could assign the Moment of Influence to anyone in any position who is deemed of sufficient seniority. Alternatively, another team might decide that only the Marketing Director is allowed to speak to tier one influencers but anyone can speak to tier two. Either way, these choices are entirely at the end user s discretion. 14

15 WHAT ABOUT INFLUENCERS WRITING IN OTHER LANGUAGES? Onalytica IRM can also help in this respect. In the same way our technology can match up content with influencers who write in English, it can do so in other languages. Imagine you want to undertake a content marketing outreach to Spanish-speaking influencers but no one in your office speaks Spanish. Simply run your existing collateral through an online translation service then upload it onto our system. Onalytica IRM will then match the collateral against influencers who are writing in Spanish. You can then contact the individual influencer and offer them the relevant piece of collateral in English or carry out a Spanish translation. Aa Aa Either way it is completely up to the departmental director to decide. 15

16 SCALE YOUR INFLUENCE. In the first year it could lead to training, reallocation of time and resources. But our experience is that using Onalytica IRM achieves rapid improvements in results. Our users have reported increases in ROI of between 300 per cent and 900 per cent per year. The unprecedented increase in measurable outcomes presents an opportunity for content marketers to demonstrate the value they bring to organisations every day. The sooner you start measuring and testing empirically, the sooner you can start making dramatic improvements to outcomes. This is your chance to start demonstrating the effectiveness of content marketing to senior management and to get the recognition and budget you deserve. We think we can help. LONDON Onalytica Ltd. Unit 2, Baden Place 9 Crosby Row London, SE1 1YW United Kingdom T: +44 (0) F: +44 (0) NEW YORK Onalytica, Inc th Avenue 4th Floor New York NY United States of America T: info@onalytica.com IRM Scale your influence